NEW YORK 6 Sep: Frances Tiafoe\u2019s vision was blurry from the tears. He was thrilled \u2014 overwhelmed, even \u2014 when the last point was over and it hit him that, yes, he had ended Rafael Nadal\u2019s 22-match Grand Slam winning streak Monday and reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals for the first time.
\n\u201cI felt like the world stopped,\u201d Tiafoe said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t hear anything for a minute.\u201d
\nThen Tiafoe found himself \u201closing it in the locker room\u201d when he saw that NBA superstar LeBron James gave him a Twitter shoutout.
\n\u201cBro,\u201d Tiafoe said, \u201cI was going crazy.\u201d
\nWhat meant the most to Tiafoe about his 6-4, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3 victory over 22-time major champion Nadal in the fourth round at Flushing Meadows, though, was looking up in his Arthur Ashe Stadium guest box and knowing his parents, Constant and Alphina, were there.
\n\u201cTo see them experience me beat Rafa Nadal \u2014 they\u2019ve seen me have big wins, but to beat those \u2018Mount Rushmore\u2019 guys? For them, I can\u2019t imagine what was going through their heads,\u201d said Tiafoe, a 24-year-old American seeded 22nd at the U.S. Open. \u201cI mean, they\u2019re going to remember today for the rest of their lives.\u201d
\nHis parents both emigrated to the United States from Sierra Leone in West Africa amid its civil war in the 1990s. They ended up in Maryland, where Constant helped construct a tennis training center for juniors, then became a maintenance man there; Alphina, Frances said, was \u201ca nurse, working two jobs, working overtime through the nights.\u201d Frances and his twin brother, Franklin, were born in 1998, and soon would be spending hour upon hour where Dad\u2019s job was, rackets in hand.
\nMaybe one day, went the dream, a college scholarship would come of it.
\n\u201cIt wasn\u2019t anything supposed to be like this,\u201d Tiafoe said Monday evening, hours after by far his biggest victory.
\nHe is the youngest American man to get this far at the U.S. Open since Andy Roddick in 2006, but this was not a case of a one-sided crowd backing one of its own. Nadal is about as popular as it gets in tennis and heard plenty of support as the volume raised after the retractable roof was shut in the fourth set.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s something to tell the kids, the grandkids: \u2018Yeah, I beat Rafa,\u2019\u201d Tiafoe said with a big smile.
\nHe served better than No. 2 seed Nadal. More surprisingly, he returned better, too. And he kept his cool, remained in the moment and never let the stakes or the opponent get to him. Nadal, a 36-year-old from Spain, had won both of their previous matches, and every set they played, too.
\n\u201cWell, the difference is easy: I played a bad match and he played a good match,\u201d Nadal said. \u201cAt the end that\u2019s it.\u201d
\nThis surprise came a day after Tiafoe followed along on TV as his pal Nick Kyrgios \u201cput on a show\u201d and eliminated No. 1 seed and defending champion Daniil Medvedev. That makes this the first U.S. Open without either of the top two seeded men reaching the quarterfinals since 2000, when No. 1 Andre Agassi exited in the second round and No. 2 Gustavo Kuerten in the first. (AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK 6 Sep: Frances Tiafoe\u2019s vision was blurry from the tears. He was thrilled \u2014 overwhelmed, even \u2014 when the last point was over and it hit him that, yes, he had ended Rafael Nadal\u2019s 22-match Grand Slam winning streak Monday and reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals for the first time. \u201cI felt like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-199829","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}